Big backers lament Ten's woes, but who's running the show?

A very astute professional funds manager quipped this week that investing in a company whose shareholders include a bunch of billionaires is a recipe for disaster because all of them can afford to lose money.

His theory looks right on the mark if Ten Network Holdings is anything to go by.

It is more than a year since Lachlan Murdoch and James Packer took a combined stake of almost 20 per cent in Ten Network. Gina Rinehart followed them some months later.

Their investment has been a disaster. The combined losses on the Ten stake of these three is estimated to be more than $350 million over the past two years.

Yesterday the directors - who no longer include Packer who retains his holding but has resigned from the board - had to stand before the other shareholders and explain what went wrong.

The Ten board was damning with faint praise for its chief executive, James Warburton, in what was a fairly frank assessment of the network's performance over the past year.

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Execution was a problem, ratings are abysmal, the advertising market is soft for all the networks but worse for Ten, and a cost-cutting program has been limp.

But it left lingering questions about where the finger of blame should be pointing for the dismal and worsening ratings and revenue performance, particularly since August.

Maybe Warburton's talents don't match the hype that surrounded him last year when Murdoch executed a high-profile kidnapping from the Seven Network.

The aggressive court case launched by Seven against Warburton elevated his status to a level that few could live up to.

Having said that, there is a very blurry sense of who is actually running the show at Ten. Is it the high-profile board headed by Murdoch and which includes mining magnate Rinehart, regional TV operator Bruce Gordon and hamburger king Jack Cowin?

Packer and the above mentioned multi-millionaires or billionaires have major investments in this company - between them about half the shares on issue.

One gets the sense that Murdoch still has a firm hand on the rudder.

"The board has taken additional steps to secure and build our business, including further reducing costs while improving our programming schedule," he said.

In most companies reducing costs and dealing with operational matters such as product is a management job not a board role.

The board has also asked the management to further reduce the cost base of the network since August, which suggests the job wasn't done properly last time.

Given Warburton has only been in the chief executive's role since March, the previous cost agenda must belong to his predecessor, Lachlan Murdoch.

The board, however, has definitely made the decision on how to fix Ten's balance sheet problems: raise another $230 million, on top of the $200 million it raised from shareholders in June. It has needed to price the shares cheaply - 20¢.

It can rest easy that its billionaire shareholders will take up their share entitlements and tip in more money